The Reasons Why
by N7Dragon5
Summary: Garrus searches for a memento in Shepard's apartment, but finds something a little different and unexpected. Another one shot (oops I lied), and written at about one in the morning, so please don't hate me if it's horrible. New chapter added because someone suggested it. And no, I will not continue this because the idea is complete. Hence the "Complete" status.
1. Chapter 1

It was more difficult than he'd imagined, going through Shepard's things in her Citadel apartment.

It wasn't seeing the place in its messed up state that was the problem—he still remembered how Shepard had almost immediately tossed things haphazardly onto the floor upon receiving the place, and after the Invasion the only difference was some collapsed walls and broken glass. The issue was remembering, knowing they'd spent time together here, and now it wouldn't happen again. He kept himself strong, however, for he did have a purpose being here.

Garrus had come looking for something of Shepard's he could take with him back onto the ship. Anything would do, besides the excessive things such as the furniture itself, and he had believed he knew where to look. He paced back and forth in her office, avoiding stepping on the remains of what used to be her private terminal, his eyes scanning every corner of the room for something, _anything._ How Shepard knew where anything was was beyond him.

The desk, almost completely hidden in a layer of soot and ash, had its drawers askew, barely hanging on to the desk itself and seeming to defy gravity. Within the drawers he was able to barely make out pieces of paper and small scribbles, presumably Shepard's writing. It felt invasive going through something she obviously hadn't intended for anyone to see, but it appeared to be all he had left. He tore the drawer out of its place in the desk and slammed it onto the desk, then lifted the papers out from their spot before carefully dusting the bits of ruin from them. He skimmed through the contents and discovered each paper was dated, and some were old. The oldest he could find was from early 2171—Shepard would have been about 17 at that time, and the fact that she kept this paper had to mean it was important. He skimmed through its contents only to find it was a very cheesy short story with notes written in the margins, explaining how Shepard knew exactly how much the story sucked. Most of the papers consisted of the same badly-written or thought out stories, and the rest was mostly some flimsily put together "notebooks," some doodles. One stack of paper, stapled and re-stapled many times over, caught his eye among the mishmash of documents in desperate need of a filing cabinet.

The title, however bad and stupid it was, was "Reasons Why I Love Him". Below that was a small paragraph, written lightly and with a delicate hand:

_Despite the stupidity of the title, this stack of paper is of the utmost importance to me, and I'm probably dead if anything happens to it. I write this "just in case," I tell myself. Just in case something happens between Garrus and me, in case we fight for some reason I can't begin to imagine, nor do I want to try, so I can remind myself why I keep him around in the first place (I felt like such an ass writing that). I will write in this every day, starting a new sentence for each reason I find, and when I can't think of anything else, at all, _ever_, I'll give this to Garrus. If he somehow finds it before that, I'm either dumb or dead. If it's the former, I demand to be checked into some kind of hospital immediately._

Garrus took a second to laugh at the statement before continuing.

_If it's the latter, then I _want_ him to read what's in here. I don't know if he'll put it down as "Shepard's Most Memorable Last Words," but keep it for closure, I guess. I feel really dumb for even thinking I'll need this, but you never know. I'd appreciate if no one else saw this, though. I'll haunt him from the afterlife if he even attempts to show anyone._

He allowed himself to smile a little. Then his expression became serious as he turned the page (as best he could with a poorly placed staple in the corner). There were several sentences, he could definitely tell that much, each starting on a fresh line, or what would have been considered fresh before the wear and tear of a hand gliding over the page, or the effects of the desk being rattled, made the paper impossibly thin. The dates next to each line were difficult to read, but as best as he could tell, the earliest entry was some time after the assault on the Collector base, around the time Shepard was taken into custody by the Alliance. This made him believe for a split second that Shepard had simply gotten bored in her room and decided to write something of actual meaning, but he didn't like that thought and pushed it out of his mind. Instead, he read the words on the page.

_1. I love him because he's funny._

_2. I love him because he's brave._

_3. I love him because he's my best friend._

The last actually hurt a little. He wasn't insulted, of course, but surprised. It created an ache in his heart that made him hurt more than he had before. He was curious to see what else was there, though, so he continued, as much as it made him want to set the whole place ablaze. However, he actually loved the simplicity of each line, and he loved the heavy impact a few words could have.

_4. I love him because he's smart._

_5. I love him because he's "tough to kill"._

_6. I love him because he's one hell of a sniper._

_7. I love him because he's been there from the beginning._

_8. I love him because he's a vigilante._

_9. I love him because he doesn't care about others' opinions._

_10. I love him because he listens._

_11. I love him because he helps me._

_12. I love him because he's different, in more ways than one._

Though the list continued long after that, Garrus didn't want to read any more and put the booklet back on the desk. He pressed his palms on the desk's surface and hung his head, eyes closed tightly and breaths coming out jagged, pained. His heart ached even more, and the pain ate away at him, left an empty void in its wake. He had no idea Shepard thought _this_ highly of him. He knew she loved him—he loved her in return, of course—but he never did ask why, nor would he expect this many answers. He could easily imagine what she'd say to him if she saw him in this state: _"You can be _such_ a girl sometimes, you know that?"_ She'd playfully hit him on the arm, then her expression would soften from a wry smile into one of dead seriousness.

Dead seriousness.

Shepard was dead. And there was absolutely nothing he could do to change that. These documents, these silly, stupid, seemingly intentionally poorly-written documents, were now as close as he'd ever get to having her back. He figured that wasn't too fair, not in the slightest, but she'd always said that life wasn't fair. Remembering that made him feel like a child, a sad, pathetic child who cried in a corner when he didn't get what he wanted, and he wanted little. However difficult it may be, he had this part of her, he supposed. This clearly meant enough for her to keep hidden, even from him. He'd have to finish reading it eventually. He carefully straightened himself out, afraid that the slightest wrong move would make him snap, and gingerly picked up the papers again, trying to keep himself from reading the words written there.

After a few moments simply standing there staring at the paper, he turned and left the office, and everything seemed to move in frames with no connection. He made his way through the kitchen. He passed the sitting room and entered the hallway. When he opened the elevator down to Silversun Strip, Liara stood there, her hand positioned as if she had just pressed the access panel. She asked if he was all right—apparently he'd spent a good half hour rummaging through Shepard's things—and he simply looked down at the papers held delicately in his hands, looked back at Liara, and nodded. He didn't say anything to her, didn't _want_ to say anything, so he entered the elevator and pushed the button without a sound.

He spent every moment he could reading the list Shepard had written, sitting on a bench he'd managed to set up in the Main Battery, and he'd gotten to number 38 when the first good idea he'd had since her death came into his mind. He hurried up to her cabin—what used to be her cabin—and stole a pencil. Then, he went back down to the Main Battery and instead sat on the floor, using the bench as a table, the papers resting upon it. He turned to one of the last pages and wrote, wondering if what he was doing was even sane. But still he wrote on that blank piece of paper, clearly intended for use later when Shepard got that far. First, he wrote a title: "Reasons Why I love Her". Writing the title made him feel silly, but he did it anyway. Second, he wrote a small paragraph, written in an almost delicate hand:

_"Despite the stupidity of the title, this stack of paper is of the utmost importance to me…" I write this because it helps. It helps me deal with the fact that she's gone, and the fact that she cared enough to do this first. I'm only here to return the favor. No one else will see this._

Finally, he listed the reasons. He listed all of the reasons he thought worthy of listing, all of the reasons why he loved her, completely in one sitting because he simply didn't have the patience to do one a day. He'd completed about two pages, front and back, before he was even a little satisfied with his work. He read it over and over again, wondering what Shepard would think of this gesture. He hoped she'd like it, because he wouldn't give anyone else the chance to judge. That stack of paper, no matter how worn and dirty and almost ruined it was, turned into the most important thing he had, and no one else was allowed to read its contents. Only Shepard would be permitted to see what he'd written for her.

Just in case.


	2. Bonus Chapter

The first place she'd shambled back to was the Citadel.

She didn't know why; she _despised_ the place now due to the fact that it was the cause of her almost-death. Her mind wandered to the memory of three years ago, just before Matriarch Benezia's death. The Matriarch had said there wasn't a light, and now she believed it was because Benezia wasn't herself. Technically, Benezia didn't die that day, but an indoctrinated Matriarch did.

Shepard knew she wasn't quite dead. She knew she was barely clinging to life and simply hadn't gotten a firm hold of it yet. But where she—only Thane would say it was actually her standing there, "the soul is your true self" nonsense—stood, her peripheral vision blurred and it was difficult to focus. Sometimes she simply disappeared, more like a picture on a computer than fading away, and she'd return just as quickly. The darkness that appeared when she _dis_appeared was her closed eyes, this much she knew, as she could feel the exhaustion and heaviness within her eyelids. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe she was right about the lost souls that end up as the ghosts of urban legends. She believed the latter much more, but her spirit wasn't exactly lost—it was looking for something, and maybe if it found what it wanted, she could live again.

Shepard—as the spirit did belong to her, and therefore knew no other identity—wandered about the apartment aimlessly, fighting back the many emotions that overwhelmed her upon seeing the place in its ruined state. Over there, she hid her embarrassment as Garrus, Jack, and even Cortez made fun of the way she couldn't dance. Over there, the entire team had taken a picture together. And over there, her private terminal, that damned little thing that gave her the message that started her on the path to kick her clone's ass. It made her laugh now, thinking about the clone. She wondered if killing the clone meant killing herself, and her brain, for want of a better term, started to hurt from reading too much into that concept.

She found herself drawn to what used to be her office. That was all right, she supposed, for she wanted to check on her papers anyway. If any could be salvaged, if she just knew they were okay, it'd be enough.

It was strange to walk in this ethereal form—she floated more than she stood, hovering only a couple of inches off the ground but hovering nonetheless. Her steps felt cushioned and light, a feeling she wasn't used to with her heavy armor and the boots she usually wore. She also moved slowly. Painstakingly slowly. The "documents" she kept in her desk were rather important, as some dated all the way back to just after the attack on Mindoir, the latest being only a couple of days ago. She tried to make herself move faster, but it was like running in a dream.

She was horrified to discover the drawer she kept her papers in had been taken out of its little cubby and tossed on the top of the desk. Her many papers were scattered about the surface, and she could only rely on sight to tell if anything was stolen, as she wasn't solid enough to pick anything up or touch things. She formed the theory that this was because she was only mostly dead, so only a little of herself was here and therefore not strong enough to have corporeal form. She only managed to get into the apartment because she just _appeared _there for whatever reason. To her great relief, the only thing that appeared to be missing was her special list. Then terror dawned on her; _the thing missing was her special list._

In a panic, she turned about—that she could do rather quickly—searching for any clues as to who was here. She got on her hands and knees, still floating a bit above the floor, and looked around. She realized her silliness then. Why would anyone take a list of reasons why she loved someone? Unless, of course, it was the very person that list was about. Again, she was relieved. Garrus no doubt believed she was dead, which she almost was, so upon reading the little paragraph she wrote he probably read the rest already, took it for its sentimental value. He was _such_ a girl sometimes. She allowed herself to smile. It was a selfish gesture, one she didn't deserve. She'd abandoned everyone at the last second, surviving just long enough to stop the Invasion and then just leaving like that. No one even knew where she was. This made a smile seem like a crime, and it was the most selfish act she could think of. What was Garrus feeling as she sat there smiling to herself? The very last thing he said to her was he loved her, and now she was gone. How was he dealing with that bombshell? The question made her smile more. The very last thing he said to her was he loved her. The very last thing she said to him was she loved him. It all worked out.

Remembering what she was doing here in the first place, she picked herself up as best as she could while hovering and feeling as if she was walking on a cloud, almost losing her balance more than once. She walked out of the office and through the kitchen, thinking only about whether or not Garrus would be able to see her, how he'd react, where he'd keep that messed up stack of paper. She thought of the _Normandy, _thought of the years she'd spent there and her rise from Anderson's XO—remembering Anderson hurt a bit—to Captain of the ship…technically. And all of a sudden, as quickly as she'd appeared in the apartment, she appeared on her ship, the familiar sights of the CIC flooding her vision.

* * *

It didn't look like anyone could see her. She walked past Traynor multiple times, noticing she seemed to take Shepard's death unexpectedly hard, but she didn't receive so much as a glace. She tried to get the attention of one of the crew in Navigation, but he didn't notice either. Whether this was an advantage or a handicap remained to be seen.

Trying to use the elevator was pointless, she knew that. She wouldn't be able to press the buttons, never mind be able to suffer the awful slowness of the elevator itself. She wasn't really one to talk, though, with her molasses-speed steps. She kind of wanted to take the difficult way down, remembering the ladders that made it to the ducts—Joker had told the story of his heroism when the Collectors boarded the ship—but those didn't exist anymore because of the _Normandy_'s retrofits. There wasn't any other way she knew of, so she hoped to God someone would make her lot easier and go in the elevator to the right place at the right time. She couldn't even open the door.

It took several minutes for her to finally give up on anyone helping her out. She didn't know why she expected more, as no one was exactly supposed to leave their stations unless they had to. That was the only time she actually wanted insubordination, though. She swiped at the access panel hopelessly multiple times. She almost lashed out with her biotic abilities, ready to break the door in half with whatever power her spirit possessed, when she found herself shocked, surprised, amazed: her hand hit the access panel, and the door opened. This worried her for a second. What if she had died a little more, just enough to make her solid? The look Traynor shot her way when the elevator opened made her heart sink. It was a look of confusion, and the question she was asking herself was obvious: Why did the door just open on its own? Shepard was a little less worried when Traynor shook her head and looked back at her monitor.

Pressing the button to get down to the Crew Deck was not as difficult. She made a horrible excuse for pressing her hand on the button, then reached out with her mind and concentrated as hard as she could. Her head hurt and there was a tingling sensation in her hand, and before she knew it she was headed downward. She received—or, rather, the _elevator_ received—strange looks from the crew as she left the confined space. Their eyes didn't follow her, however, proving she still couldn't be seen, but she was a little tired. She shouldn't be making herself "real" unless she really had to. She had no desire to die, not completely, just yet.

She was very lucky when she approached the Main Battery's door. It opened on its own, and Garrus appeared in the doorway, briskly walking past her without any evidence of acknowledgement. Seeing him again made her heart swell. It created that feeling of love and desire again that she thought she'd lost. In spite of this, knowing he wasn't able to acknowledge her in any way hurt a little. But she wasn't here for that. She was here for her papers. She managed to slip inside the Main Battery just before the door closed, almost getting her foot caught in the door. It probably couldn't sense her there, thinking she wasn't there in the first place, so it would have crushed her ankle if she wasn't fast enough. There was a little bench she didn't remember settled against the wall, a badly stapled stack of worn papers open on top of it. She didn't recognize the writing, but whatever remnants of a translator she had identified it as turian language. She'd never seen it written out before, she didn't even know if her translator could pick up writing, so seeing it there on her papers was strange. She looked closer, relying on her translator to make sense of the symbols and the things that almost looked like English letters.

The title made her smile again. "Reasons Why I Love Her" was scrawled in relatively large letters across the top of the page, and below that was a paragraph reminiscent of the one she'd written what seemed like an eternity ago:

_"Despite the stupidity of the title, this stack of paper is of the utmost importance to me…" I write this because it helps. It helps me deal with the fact that she's gone, and the fact that she cared enough to do this first. I'm only here to return the favor. No one else will see this._

"No one else will see this." She ran that sentence through her mind, wanted to say it, _scream_ it out loud from the rooftops, but didn't want her cover blown. She loved that he'd kept this just for her, wouldn't let anyone else read it. It made her…what was the word? Happy? Yes, happy was the word she believed she should use. Such a simple word for such a powerful emotion. The feelings spread as she read the reasons, very similar to the ones she'd placed before.

_1. I love her because she's funny._

_2. I love her because she's brave._

_3. I love her because she's _my_ best friend._

A sense of repetition edged on her mind: The last actually hurt a little. She wasn't insulted, of course, but surprised. It created an ache in her heart that made her hurt more than she had before. God damn, she had to wake up. But she had to keep reading. Curiosity overcame her, and she continued to scan the page. Many of the same reasons were written down, the same ones she'd used for him, but others were different. For example: _5. I love her because she came back to help people._ Or, _6. I love her because she's good with a shotgun._ Something hurt at the inner corners of her eyes. Pressure formed there, a pressure she hadn't allowed to manifest properly for a long time. She almost did before taking the final charge into the Citadel beam as she held Garrus' face, telling him she loved him. Before that, the pressure formed when they kissed in front of those turian soldiers back in London, before even deciding the plan for getting to the beam. Before that still, when he got his scars. She thought he died then, not just because all of the merc fighting was for nothing, but because he was a friend, a good one. Maybe she even cared for him then. It hardly mattered. The pressure was here now, and this time, she let it come. She welcomed it.

Water poured from her eyes. She actually enjoyed the warm feeling of the tears sliding down her cheeks, some ending up in her mouth and leaving a bitter and salty taste that she savored. The wetness of her tear-stained cheeks would have been embarrassing before, but now she didn't care. She kind of hoped someone would see her, hoped _Garrus_ would see her, just so she could tell him how much she appreciated the gesture, no matter how simple. If she survived, if this part of her spirit returned to her body whole enough for her to live again, she'd tell him as soon as she could. She'd tell him she was there when he left the room, that she read the list, and that she cried. Especially that she cried. She wanted nothing to be known more than the fact that she cried.

Garrus had done this for her, and for her alone, and that was enough for her to fight to live.

Her spirit disappeared suddenly from the room, the darkness of her closed eyes reappearing, before she breathed again—more of a gasp, really—and the feeling of the air going down her throat and into her lungs was reassuring. The feeling of wetness on her cheeks appeared as well. It told her she could live now. It told her she hadn't abandoned everything and everyone she loved. Not yet.

She couldn't wait to tell Garrus the things she'd seen and done in a matter of minutes.


End file.
